Sunday 8 February 2009 19.00 EST
First published on Sunday 8 February 2009 19.00 EST

You are never alone with a book. You share your solitude with the author and an invisible network of silent companions: all those who have read the same book or are one day going to do so.

The only catch is that at some point in this extraordinary communion of print, paper and silence you may want to look up and say "Hey, have you read this?" and there won't be anyone there to say "Yes! I loved that bit!"

However, the more precise the passion – whether it's for Ancient Roman histories, the memoirs of 18th century libertines, the confections of the Bloomsbury set, studies of quantum electrodynamics or the evolution of consciousness – the more detailed will be your questions, and the more distant your fellow readers.

A science book club is inevitably an exercise in companionship at arm's length, or even a great deal further, because readers bring to the text very different levels of expertise and awareness.

Terry Pratchett or JRR Tolkien fans start from the same place: none of them has been to Discworld, or seen a Hobbit. But admirers of Richard Dawkins or Steve Jones or Steven Rose may or may not have a background in evolutionary biology, genetics or neuroscience. One reader might have started with a background in banking and a wistful interest in physics, got hooked on the intellectual adventure of cosmology and then begun to ask the great question: if life started here, does it exist in other galaxies? And if life is inevitable, is consciousness? What is life anyway?

Another may have started out as a lover of romantic poetry, followed a brilliant biographer through his lives of Shelley and Coleridge and then naturally marvelled at the achievements of Banks and Herschel in Richard Holmes's latest book The Age of Wonder, and begun to ask: how do you identify a new species? Where do stars come from? How do I even begin to find out?

Science book enthusiasts really can help each other. The catch is that theirs a minority addiction, and even the definition of a science book is a slippery one. The internet might have been made for a science book club in which its members share their thoughts about a particular book and help each other out with definitions, interpretation, cross-references and helpful beginner's guides, and now – smack in a new age of wonder, 200 years after the birth of Charles Darwin – seems a good time to start one.

Inevitably, we start with evolution. What else could we do, 150 years after the publication of On the Origin of Species? But we should not start with Darwin himself, or any of the dozens of books about the man published in the last few years. It is the science that should launch a science book club, not the individual. Both Steve Jones with his book Almost Like a Whale and Richard Dawkins with The Ancestor's Tale have in very different ways imposed modern discovery on Victorian research, and would make great candidates, but with the licence of an inaugural convenor, I propose a work with even wider scope.

Life: An Unauthorised Biography by Richard Fortey Photograph: Public Domain

Richard Fortey's Life: An Unauthorised Biography is a work steeped in the scientific revolution launched by Darwin, but it incorporates the great early science that preceded and influenced Darwin. It has another virtue as the first text for a new book club: it is unashamedly literary. Fortey is a geologist and palaeontologist with a long career at the Natural History Museum, but his book is rich in references to Yeats and Jaroslav Hašek, Orwell and Evelyn Waugh, Gerard Manley Hopkins and the Just So Stories.

A good science book doesn't have to be great literature. We read it not to be dazzled by words, tropes, allusions and plays upon words but instead to understand the world it describes. Clarity counts, literary cleverness is at a discount.

But Fortey's book draws from literature's arsenal naturally but with restraint to pull together the big picture, the whole story, the astounding epic that began with the arbitrary, unpredictable accretion of dust in a hot, hostile sphere around a young star 4.5 billion years ago, and ends with the first domestication of plants and animals by human tribes somewhere in the Fertile Crescent at the end of the last ice age. Darwin and Darwin's scholarship is at the heart of the book, but the adventure begins with the birth of the solar system and ends with the emergence of settled human society.

This is pre-history with a vengeance: an awesome, sprawling, mysterious story inevitably based on incomplete evidence and cautious conjecture, one that demands not just scholarship, experience and insight, but some of the instincts of an epic poet, and perhaps some of the sardonic impatience of an Edward Gibbon (a storyteller who doesn't get a mention, although Goethe, Gulliver, Thomas Gray and Goya all do).

I reviewed Life: An Unauthorised Biography for the Guardian when it first appeared in 1997. I loved it immoderately then and I picked it up a dozen years later and loved it even more. I loved it, from its long, beautiful opening essay about the search for fossil trilobites on a beach in Spitsbergen, to its concluding imagery a Las Vegas gambling hall, with the reminder that all things alive on earth now are the outcome of a series of unpredictable throws of the genetic dice – random mutations laid on the gaming table of natural selection. "Like the vast ranks of gamblers at Las Vegas who come away with nothing, most mutations also lead to nothing," writes Fortey.

I'd defy anybody to read this book and come away with nothing, but we'll see. You tell me, and better still, tell all those others that we cannot see, and have yet to meet, but who will all bring their own insights to this.